Page:American Medical Biographies - Kelly, Burrage.djvu/969

NAME PUTNAM 947 PUTNAM left one son, Judge William LeBaron Putnam, of Portland, Maine, a jurist noteworthy upon the American bench. Dr. Putnam's father was Israel Putnam, a cousin of Gen. Putnam of the Revolution ; his mother Hannah LeBaron, a descendant of Dr. Francis LeBaron, a great man in colonial days. Israel Putnam, Jr., graduated from Brown University, Rhode Island, in 1827, studied with Prof. James McKenna of Topsham, Maine, and attended lectures at the Medical School of Maine, graduating in 1830. Instead of remaining in the same town with his pre- ceptor, and trying to compete with him and divide the practice, as is the way in this cen- tury, young Putnam moved to Wells, Maine, and began practice there. After staying four years, he married Miss Sarah Emory Frost, of Topsham, moved to Bath and re- mained for the rest of his life. He soon ob- tained positions of prominence, as a surgeon to the Marine Hospital, and City Physician ; he was a member of Maine Medical Society, and the Maine Medical Association, and did excellent work in each. In his later years he was often of great help to younger physicians, and once said to a young graduate, "Come and take that house next to me, and when they call me out in the night I will say, 'You had better go to doctor- so-and-so, across the street, he is a first-rate fellow, and wider awake at night than I am in the day time.' " He, like every other doctor, had a favorite drug, hyoscyamus, a good supply of which he carried around with him in his pockets in the shape of a large black lump. When some patient would meet him in the street and say one of his women folks was "sort of nervous like," he was sure to fish out the hyoscyamus. pinch out enough to make a few pills, roll them around in his hand and fingers as men do tobacco, and hand them to the old patient, who would go off rejoicing. When a physician can resign a ten years' mayoralty (Bath), then resume his practice, and get all he wants for patients, it proves that he has made a few friends. Looking at the portrait of this well-known physician, you see a large face, bright eyes, long lips smiling at you from the corners, and you cannot help feeling that you knew him in real life. After a prolonged illness of several months, Dr. Putnam died June 30, 1876, highly thought of and greatly missed. James A. Spalding. Trans. Maine Med. Asso. Putnam, James Jackson (1846-1918) James Jackson Putnam, for nearly fifty years identified with neurology in Boston, his native city, died suddenly November 4, 1918, at his home, of angina pectoris. Born in Boston. October 3, 1846, the son of Charles Gideon and Elizabeth Cabot Jackson Putnam, he had as his heritage the best tradi- tions of a distinguished ancestry. His paternal grandfather, Samuel Putnam, of the Harvard class of 1787, was for many years judge of the supreme court of Massachusetts. His father was a physician of distinction and his mother was a daughter of Dr. James Jack- son (q. v.), one of the most notable figvjres of his day in American medicine, an appreciative memoir of whom Dr. Putnam published in 1905. Dr. Putnam was graduated at Harvard Col- lege in the class( of 1866 at the early age of twenty, already a student of high promise. Following his graduation from the Harvard Medical School he became a house-pupil at the Massachusetts General Hospital and there- after continued his medical education in Leip- sig and Vienna under the instruction of Rokitansky and Meynert. He also visited Paris and later England, where he came into intimate relations with Huylings Jackson, for whom he had always the warmest admiration. With this equipment and with the enthusi- asm of a pioneer in a hitherto largelj' neg- lected branch of medicine, he forthwith became identified with study of the nervous system, both in its normal and pathological relations. He was appointed a lecturer on nervous dis- eases at the Harvard Medical School in 1872. and established the neurological clinic at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1893 liis long years of teaching and devotion to his chosen subject were rewarded by his appoint- ment as first professor of diseases of the nervous system at the Harvard Medical School. In this capacity he served until 1912, when he was retired by reason of age and made professor emeritus. Dr. Putnam was one of the charter mem- bers of the American Neurological Associa- tion and was the last survivor for some years of the group of men who founded the society in 1874. He was also a member of the Amer- ican Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the Association of American Physicians, the American Medical Association, the American Association of Pathologists and Bacteriolog- ists, the American Psychopathological and Psychoanalytical Associations and many State societies, and took frequent part in their meet-